An entrepreneur says something—something so naïve, egregious and hackneyed—that it makes the investors, along with educators who are now increasingly in the audience, physically cringe. As funders wince and squirm uncomfortably, some are thinking along the lines of: “How do I respond to this pitch genuinely without coming off like a jerk?”

In the interest of fixing this problem at the source, I reached out to some of the advisors and investors in the
Dreamit Edtech network to get their “lemon lists” of concepts,…